


And Call It Home

by little_librarian



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: F/M, Post-Season/Series 05
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-06
Updated: 2020-06-06
Packaged: 2021-03-03 23:40:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,162
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24563980
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/little_librarian/pseuds/little_librarian
Summary: Slowly, Zari moves more and more of her things into John’s bedroom. She’s so caught up in finding Sara that she doesn’t think much of it until Lita asks to borrow a phone charger—when Zari says there’s a spare on her shelf, Lita heads straight to John’s room.
Relationships: John Constantine/Zari Tomaz | Zari Tarazi
Comments: 50
Kudos: 203





	And Call It Home

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ClaraHue](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ClaraHue/gifts).



> For ClaraHue, who asked in [this](https://clarahue.tumblr.com/post/619929997952647168/whispers-someone-write-a-fic-about-zari-moving) Tumblr post for a fic about Zari moving into John's room, and for ginpomme for generally being cool.
> 
> Title shamelessly stolen from "Little Old Me" by Brighten.

Zari wakes up to the sound of her phone alarm and the feeling of low thread count sheets rubbing against her skin. Pressed against her back, John stirs just enough to groan into her neck.

“Wha’ time’s it?”

“Six o’clock,” Zari says, wriggling free from both his grasp and his itchy sheets. “Gidget, lights.”

“Bloody hell,” he groans, rolling away and throwing his arm over his eyes. He’s definitely hungover after their night at the club, and Zari’s almost positive that he only sees the early morning when he stays awake all night.

She laughs and presses a kiss to his chin, then goes to commandeer the bathroom.

Later, when she’s ready for the day and John’s in the galley making his gross magical hangover cure, Zari sneaks off to the fabricator and has Gideon make bed sheets with a ridiculously high thread count. She likes sleeping in John’s room, but there’s nothing in this world that can convince her to regularly tolerate the ship’s standard sheets.

She changes his sheets and feels satisfied for all of two minutes before Ava turns on the loudspeaker and asks, frantic, if anyone knows where Sara is.

***

It takes John a week to notice his new sheets, at which point he pinches the fabric and says, “Hang on, the color’s off.”

Zari rolls her eyes. Of course the color is what he notices, nevermind that he’s probably never slept on softer bedding. They’ve all been distracted searching for Sara, but she’d honestly expected him to notice sooner.

“Did you do something to my sheets?” he asks, looking at her like she’s committed the ultimate betrayal.

“I got you better ones,” Zari says as she joins him in bed.

“What if I liked my old set?”

Zari resists the urge to roll her eyes again, if only because she knows he’s just being stubborn for the sake of it. “You liked them so much it took you a week to notice they were gone?”

John pouts at her, then rubs at the sheets again. He’ll never say it, but Zari knows from the way he likes to nuzzle her hair that he has a fondness for soft things against his skin. “Suppose I can live with it,” he admits.

Zari pats his chest. “Good, because I already asked Mick to burn the other ones.”

“Oh, I bet he liked that.”

“He _really_ did.”

John suddenly rolls on top of her, bracing himself with his arms on either side of her and smirking suggestively. “You know the best thing about new sheets?”

Zari politely doesn’t point out that they’re only new to him. “If you say ‘getting them dirty,’ John, I swear—” but then he’s kissing down her neck and she really doesn’t care that it’s the worst line she’s ever heard.

***

Zari has a habit of organizing when she’s stressed. She can’t be idle when she’s bursting with nerves, and there’s something about seeing a room all cleaned up that always soothes her. Her bedroom is meticulously tidy, though, so she takes to John’s room.

Every flat surface in his bedroom is strewn with candles and haphazard knickknacks. Zari leaves the candles as they are because there’s a good chance they’re arranged for a ritual or somesuch, but everything else is fair game. She knows from watching John that there’s no rhyme or reason to how he tosses items onto his dresser; he just wants them to be accessible.

She finds bits of her presence scattered around as she works: a hairbrush, her spare phone charger on the nightstand, a jar of lotion that she likes to use before bed. It should horrify her to see her favorite earrings lying next to a rock with a pair of rusty nails atop it, but instead, she feels briefly content.

She’s partway through sorting the black hole John calls a dresser when the man in question walks in, freezes, and says, “What’s happening in here?”

“Organizing,” Zari says, folding another pair of pants. “No wonder your clothes are always wrinkled—you just stuff everything in here.”

“Right,” John says slowly. He nods to himself as he looks around the room, hands in his pockets. “You have a go at my books?”

“Alphabetical. Except for the ones with hieroglyphs.” She holds up a knit sweater that she’d dug from the depths of a drawer. “You have, like, ten of these. How come you never wear them?”

“Forgot I had those. Now come on, what’s this all about?”

John looks at her with such sincere concern, and Zari sighs and lets the sweater drop, unfolded, into the drawer.

“I’m worried,” she admits.

“About Sara.”

Harsher than she means to, she snaps, “Of course about Sara!”

John doesn’t meet her tone. Instead he says, “Come here,” and guides her to the bed with his hands on her arms. Something about his soft voice and the gentle way he handles her leaves Zari feeling abruptly drained. She goes willingly, perching next to him on the edge of the bed and resting her head on his shoulder.

John slings his arm around her but otherwise stays silent. Zari suddenly remembers a time when they had to provoke each other into honesty. She much prefers this quiet patience, this chance to soak in his comfort while she gathers her thoughts.

“It’s been so long,” Zari says at last. “There’s no trace of her anywhere and our current guess is maybe she got abducted, because that’s somehow a thing that happens to her, and there is _nothing_ I can do.”

John holds her a bit tighter and says, “I’ve tried every tracking spell I know and they’ve all been shite. We’re all useless right now, love.”

“Oh, that’s very reassuring.” She pulls away enough to glare at him.

“Sara’s tough,” he continues, reeling her back to him. “And this crazy lot have a way of pulling through, you know that.”

He doesn’t say “we’ll find her,” or, “she’ll be all right,” which Zari appreciates. That’s all anyone seems to say these days, and the phrases have quickly become meaningless to her. But this, just being held and told that she’s not alone in feeling useless—it’s a comfort she didn’t know she needed.

She turns to kiss him, chaste and sweet, and then whispers, “Thank you,” against his lips, and John responds with that genuine smile that she loves so much.

Zari takes a deep breath and looks around the half-tidied room. She doesn’t feel the need to stress-clean anymore but she hates to leave a job unfinished, so she pats John on the leg and returns to the dresser. “You know,” she says, looking speculatively at the clothes she’s folded, “there’s a lot more room in here when everything’s organized.”

“Is there, now?” John asks in that amused, lilting tone that means he sees right through her.

“Mmhm. And I’m running out of space in my room.” She’s hedging, she knows, but she wants to gauge his reaction. John’s protective of his space. He hasn’t fussed about the random things she forgets in his room, but this is far more deliberate.

John is silent for a beat too long. When Zari turns around, she finds he’s just staring at her. His expression is something soft and undefinable that makes her chest tighten. She can’t remember anyone else ever looking at her like that.

He holds her gaze, then nods at the dresser and says, “There’s your solution, then.”

Zari’s filled with sudden giddiness, a joy that she hasn’t felt since Sara went missing. She feels briefly guilty, but she also knows that no one on the team, Sara least of all, would begrudge her this moment of happiness. So she grabs John by the hand, drags him to her room, and delights in how disgruntled he looks when she dumps clothes in his arms and tells him, “You can help carry.”

***

Another day, another early morning wake up call. Zari can’t even bring herself to feign annoyance once she hears the stress in Ava’s voice. She’d forgotten her silk robe in her room, so she pulls on one of the sweaters that John pretends he doesn’t own and leans sleepily against him as they walk to the bridge.

Ava has a video call going in the study with a blonde woman that Zari vaguely recognizes. When she asks, Nate says, “That’s Kara. She’s totally cool and she’s also Supergirl.”

Finally, Zari’s memory catches up. “Oh! She was on the news all the time when I was a kid. Why are we calling her?”

“She’s an alien,” Nate tells her. “But the good kind, not the kind that’s evil and slimy and tries to kill you when you kiss them.”

“You _kissed_ a Dominator?” Kara asks, horrified.

Ava waves her hands at them. “Can we _please_ focus?”

Kara doesn’t have any answers for them but she does promise to keep an eye out, which is their best and only search result so far. Ava practically deflates when the call ends, and it’s clear to see that she’d been hoping desperately for a better outcome.

“Hey,” Zari says, leaving John’s side to draw Ava into a hug. “We’ll figure it out. You know we will.”

It’s a sure sign that Ava’s been running herself ragged when she accepts the comfort rather than pulling away and starting her search anew. She nods against Zari’s shoulder and says, “I know.” She nods again, only this time it’s more like a nuzzle. “ _How_ is your sweater so soft?”

“Magic, probably.” Zari shrugs then adds in a stage-whisper, “It’s John’s.”

“John,” Ava repeats, deadpan. She steps away from Zari to look properly at him. “John Constantine has other clothes on this ship.”

John glares at them, but it’s half-hearted at best—more for show than anger. There’s something a bit lighter about Ava as she teases John, and none of them are willing to ruin it.

***

Slowly, Zari moves more and more of her stuff into John’s bedroom. She’s so caught up in first finding and then rescuing Sara that she doesn’t think much of it until Lita asks to borrow a phone charger during Sara’s welcome back party—when Zari says there’s a spare on her shelf, Lita heads straight to John’s room.

Before going to bed that night, Zari takes a moment to think. It’s been ages since she slept in her old bed, and almost all of her clothes are in here now. Her makeup caddy has a permanent spot near the door, and her favorite ring light is set up in the little living area where she’s been recording most of her videos. Her self-help books and trashy romance novels are mixed in with leather-bound spellbooks because she insists the bookshelf be alphabetical. Her slippers sit next to the bed— _her side_ of the bed, she realizes—and a few pairs of John’s shoes are on the shoe rack she’d set up. His soul coin is in her jewelry box because “no one will look for it there,” and she loves the way he stares at her when she wears it. There’s even a picture of her family on the shelf that separates the sleeping space from the living space, and next to it is a picture of John and his mom. Zari remembers how overwhelmingly _trusted_ she’d felt when the picture quietly appeared on the shelf one day.

“What is it?” John asks when he notices that she hasn’t moved from where she’s standing.

“Nothing, just. . .” Zari smiles and gestures vaguely at the room. “All moved in.”

He chuckles and comes to stand close behind her. “Did you just figure that out?”

Zari turns to swat at him, then catches the implication that he’d been aware of her subconsciously moving in. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

John smirks and gives a little shrug. “Can’t say I minded,” he says. He doesn’t quite meet her eyes, though, and Zari knows the subtext—he’d thought that saying something might make her reevaluate.

She catches his face in her hands and kisses him as if she can take away his doubts with her lips alone. John’s clutching at her waist, and he holds her tighter when she finally pulls back.

“Doesn’t look half bad,” he says breathlessly, surveying the room over her shoulder.

It’s been a long while since Zari called a bedroom “ours.” Her last few relationships had been PR stunts more than anything, and she’d always insisted on maintaining her own space because of it. But there’s something so natural about it now, and she can’t imagine going back to her old room.

“Do you think Sara would let me paint the walls?” Zari asks, only half-joking.

“Captain Lance might let you, but I certainly will not,” Gideon pipes up.

John laughs and kisses her head. “I’ve got a whole mansion you can paint,” he says into her hair, and Zari has never felt more content.


End file.
